Dashed Off VIII

"Every classification has reference to a tendency toward an end. If this tendency is the tendency which has determined the class characters of the objects, it is a natural classification." C. S. Peirce
"Every unitary classification has a leading idea or purpose, and is a natural classification in so far as that same purpose is determinative in the production of the objects classified."

Peirce on the 'longitude' of final causes: "By this I mean that while a certain ideal end state of things might most perfectly satisfy a desire, yet a situation somewhat different from that will be far better than nothing; and in general, when a state is not too far from teh ideal state, the nearer it approaches that state the better." (CP 1.207)

typological classification and the longitude of final causes
cp. "clustering distributions will characterize purposive classes" (Peirce, CP 1.207).

"the fact that classes merge is no proof that they are not truly distinct classes" Peirce

Dave Oswald Mitchell on protest organizing
(1) Put target in a decision dilemma.
(2) Do the media's work for them (give them the story).
(3) Lead with sympathetic characters.

"Unjust and unlawful is any monopoly, educational and scholastic, which, physically or morally, forces families to make use of government schools contrary to the dictates of their Christian conscience." Pius XI

When we say that something works in a lawlike fashion, we mean that it does so as if its possibilities were constrained and weighted so as to select a result; that is final causation.

Roberts (2008): While theories may draw on laws, the function of being a law is not part of a scientific theory.

pseudonymous persona and quasi-property

"Not everyone who imagines something is also aware and judges that he has imagined." Avicenna

Steinkrüger (2015): Aristotle's logic is a relevance logic in the sense that (a) premises and conclusion must in some way share content and (b) premises must be used to derive the conclusion.

God as the truthmaker for 'Good is to be done and sought, and bad avoided'

natural a priori (mind prior to any experience), structural a priori (mind in making sense of experience to begin with), conceptual a priori (mind drawing on experience and going beyond it)
sensory a posteriori, memorial or memorative a posteriori, introspective a posteriori

Everybody accepts some philosophical claims on testimony.

felt alienness accounts of the external world
(perhaps more general as felt alterity, with alienness as an extreme form)

Because of the way utilitarianism is structured, utilitarianism tends toward catastrophe-mining.

Philosophical rhetoric studies possible means of persuasion -- the 'possible' is important.

Whewellian superinduction of concepts and the synthetic a priori

"We have a human need to pray in a way that overwhelms our senses, and the human need to have that experience interpreted to us so that it becomes even richer and fuller and more significant, because worship is not an individual act but a communal event." Cat Hodge

Ganeri (2003): Nyaya logic as case-based reasoning

"Even plants have things done to them that are harmful or beneficial, and what does them good must be related in some way to their living and dying." Philippa Foot

Goldman's account of sexual desire in "Plain Sex" ("desire for contact with another person's body and for the pleasure which such contact produces") massively oversexualizes the desire for bodily contact and fails to recognize the distinctness of it from the desire to give pleasure and similar desires.

What we usually call political parties are not parties as such but organizational shells for them.

A philosophical system is a unified interpretation of arguments.

Some subarguments are within the universe of the main argument (direct reasons for premises); others are in a universe modally related (reductio & hypothetical 'suppose x' arguments generally).

The spirit of moral laws is not confined to some purely interior disposition but is a matter of the disposition of one's whole life.

"No man can possibly be righteous without having the hope, from the analogy of the physical world, that righteousness must have its reward." Kant

The very idea of making suggests the question of whether the world is made and what, if it is, makes it.

Spatial metaphors typically capture modal information.

"All men are certain that there is an external world: and yet they have not this certainty from their consciousness, for consciousness is limited to phenomena purely internal; nor do they know the fact by evidence, because, even supposing the possibility of a true demonstration, many would be incpaable of comprehending it, and because the majority have never thought, and never will think, of such demonstrations." Balmes

Balmes's common sense is a sense of the extravagantness of a possibility; by it we recognize that some possibilities, despite being possibilities, are too extravagant to be true, that something seems too unlikely to be taken seriously. This is fallible, he thinks, unless four features are found in it:
(1) the impulse is irresistible
(2) it is plausible to treat it as common to the whole human race
(3) it endures tests of reason
(4) it bears on the satisfaction of some fundamental need of all human life.

four kinds of impossibility (Balmes)
(1) metaphysical: implies contradiction
(2) physical: violates law of nature
(3) ordinary/moral: violates ordinary course of things
(4) of common sense: too improbable by its very nature ever to be verified

"In reading, there are two essentials: to select good books, and to read them well." Balmes

"It is only when perception fails us that we have to ask the question whether a thing is so or not." Aristotle

"Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely." Peirce

Law does not govern external action only; it also gives people a guideline to keep in mind in relating to others.

moral regards: self-reflective, cooperative, abstract, regulative

each idea a silkworm for the magnaneries of reason

Representations are activations.

The brain is an organ of sensory representation.

Whether logical truths exclude possibilities depends on the specific modalities being considered.

(1) paradigmatics
(2) formal model construction
(3) history of philosophy
(4) evidential analysis
(5) socratics

Jurisprudence does not ignore internal disposition; its means of taking it into account are limited, but they are important. (Consider, for instance, the roles of 'malice', 'insanity', 'sincerity', 'mental anguish', and the like.)

term contradiction

syllogistic reduction as a practice for students on the way to doing proofs fully

Martin (1993): "To fathom the nature of etiquette, one must realize that etiquette plays at least three distinct, conceptually separable social functions: a regulative, a symbolic, and a ritual function."
-- law cannot be justly administered without etiquette
-- "In its symbolic function, etiquette provides a system of symbols whose semantic content provides for predictability in social relations, especially among strangers."

(1) There are no degrees of belief, properly speaking.
(2) The language usually used to suggest there are does not, and could not, support degrees of belief being real-valued.
(3) There is no reason to think that degrees of belief would have to correspond to odds for betting on propositions.

'Popular antiquities' should have been kept as a subgenus of 'folklore'.

'personal brand' as quasi-property

person ) persona ) personal brand (persona instrumentality)

natural religion as seal of ethics

Liguori on baptism of desire: Moral Theology Bk 6 nn 95-97
-- note that he takes it to be de fide (Council of Trent session 6, chapter 4: 'sine lavacro regenerationis aut ejus voto')

fluminis, flaminis, sanguinis

grace as that whereby we imitate God and converse with him.

"A benevolent judge is unthinkable." (Kant)
-- a great deal about Kant in this one sentence

Democracy obscures the courses of power by allowing power to be exercised anonymously through intermediary networks built for that purpose; thus with it, one always has to consider the behind-scenes.

If 'best scientific view' includes our best scientific accounts of all major domains, our best scientific view is at any given moment incoherent.

reason's title to inquire

Even the most prudent people require advice, and even at times clarification of principles and moral concepts, or morally relevant concepts, that another can more easily provide.

freedom as "that faculty which gives unlimited usefulness to all other faculties" (Kant)

the duty of ordering one's life so as to be fit for the performance of moral duties

consciousness of one's life as a trust

moral luck // intellectual luck

We use metaphors not only to get people to notice things, but also to get them not to notice things, i.e., to obscure things. One can perhaps treat the latter as sleight-of-indication, misdirecton taht is trying to get people to notice something else, but these are also not exhaustive, and also shared with literal discourse.

mathematical insulation: there is no way to unite all of math into a single system without insulating some parts from some other parts

Rigor is a relation of means to end.

"All nations begin with theology and are founded by theology." Maistre

"The beautiful, in all imaginable genres, is that which pleases enlightened virtue. Any other definition is false or insufficient." Maistre

Secularization proceeds by active resource denial on one side and active retreat on the other.

NB Xiong's argument that we assume external objects because we become accustomed to relying on things for nourishment.

genuine liberal Christianity vs. neochristianity

a mind rich with folds

While Wittgenstein talks about 'hinge' propositions, it would perhaps be more reasonable to talk of envelope propositions.

subject, world, and God as postulates of philosophical inquiry

The notion of cause is at the heart of our notion of the world; without causes there is no world.

"Observation and experience show that a worthless man values his life more than his person." Kant

philosophical problems as loci for debates

Evidence-collection is structured by choices.

the rights of refuge of victims of wreck (shipwreck, plane crashes, storms and other catastrophes forcing to shelter) vs the rights of refuge of people in flight

Evening Note for Friday, May 1

Thought for the Evening: Modes of Reference in Rituals

In a paper that should be better known, "Modes of Reference in the Rituals of Judaism" [Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1987), pp. 109-128], Josef Stern applied some ideas of Nelson Goodman's theory of symbols in art to various Jewish rituals (as you might expect from the title). I'm not especially impressed by Goodman's account in general, but Stern, I think, does a good job of capturing what is of value in it.

Goodman takes symbols to be primarily constituted by reference, in which they stand for something; but there are different ways things can stand for something. There are several, but two notable ones are denotation, in which something like a description or a word attributes something to something as the possession of the latter, and exemplification, in which the symbol possesses that to which it refers and thus exhibits it, like a sample of something.

What Stern does is take this and apply the ideas to "ritual gestures", by which he means "all actions and objects that achieve ritual status" (p. 109). Judaism, of course, is very ritual-rich. The ritual gestures of Judaism do not merely act as symbols, but they do act as symbols of various kinds. When we look out how these ritual gestures refer, we get several varieties, which are sometimes found in simple forms but sometimes mixed in complex ways.

(1) Representation, which is essentially denotation. A typical case of this is the ritual gesture that is a commemoration. Circumcision, for instance, commemorates the covenant of Abraham by way of Scriptural authority; there is nothing particularly about circumcision itself that suggests Abraham or covenants, but Scriptural authority sets a precedent and a standard for its use as a way to refer to the Abrahamic covenant in order to bring it to mind. Others might do so in a way that's more 'pictorial', like haroset at Passover, which commemorates slavery in Egypt; a paste of fruits and nuts, its muddy color and texture is a sort of pictorial representation of mortar for bricks. Yet others might do so more metaphorically or metonymically, by depicting or suggesting something related to or like that to which they refer.

(2) Exemplification. Exemplification is not complete reiteration; as a symbolic mode of reference it generally takes a little something (we might say) that is of the same type as what it refers to. Stern's example is that Israel is commanded (Dt 26:2) to bring every first fruit; given that this is, if taken hyperliterally, usually impracticable, and given that offering first fruits is by its nature a symbolic offering anyway, the Rabbis have generally taken this to mean that you should bring first fruits capable of representing every first fruit, namely, the seven specifically mentioned in Deuteronomy 8:8. All of these are actually first fruits, but they also stand for all first fruits whatsoever.

(3) Expression, which is a form of exemplification that works figuratively. Bowing at the beginning of the benedictions of the Amidah expresses homage. It does not do so because the person bowing has feelings of homage. In fact, it is the reverse: the point of the bowing is to put the person bowing in a state of mind that is at least suitable to such feelings.

All three of these are often found in combination. Take representation and exemplification. "While denotation is the preponderant mode of reference for (verbal) languages, and exemplification is more central to the arts, the two frequently function in tandem in ritual gestures" (p. 112). The bitter herbs of Passover both exemplify the bitter herbs used in the ancient Passovers and also commemorate the sudden flight from Egypt, and this is quite common; indeed, the interaction between these two modes of reference often lead to further symbolizations associated with them. This leads to the forming of symbol-chains, which give to ritual a living flexibility.

While these three are in some way fundamental, there are other kinds of reference in which ritual gestures refer to other, parallel ritual gestures.

(4) Allusion. One ritual may have reference to another; Stern notes that the rabbis will sometimes explain a Sukkot ritual by a Shavuot ritual. Another example that he doesn't use is that there's a lot of evidence that early Hanukkah rituals were modeled on Sukkot rituals; Hanukkah, the feast of dedication, was a relatively new celebration, and as it was a joyful celebration for the people, it was done by partial imitation of the major festival that was both joyful and popular in its actual celebration, namely, Sukkot, the festival of tabernacles. But it's not as if the early ritual gestures were just direct copies; they were adaptations to different purposes, and the rituals were modified accordingly, sometimes quite heavily.

(5) Re-enactment. A re-enactment is a token of the same type as that to which it refers, so as to be a successor to it in a series. Thus a Sabbath ritual gesture, which commemorates Creation, is also a re-enactment of previous Sabbath ritual gestures. A Passover seder is both a commemoration of the Exodus and a re-enactment of past Passover seders going back to the original.

(6) However, perhaps the most important way in which a ritual gesture would refer to others, is one for which Stern doesn't settle on a name but which we might call Co-participation. In the Passover seder there is a recitation of the Haggadah. The Haggadah commemorates the Exodus both by description and by dramatic portrayal; it is an exemplification of the kind of thing that is commanded to be done for Passover in Exodus 13:8; it re-enacts previous recitations; but it does something more. The Haggadah represents those participating in the seder as in some way involved with the Exodus itself. This goes beyond commemoration in the ordinary sense. The way Stern tries to explain this is by suggesting that this is tied up to the nature of the ritual as a story, and in particular as a story of stories. Storytelling of the sort that is expected in the seder is not simply a description, but an imaginative appropriation; but the Haggadah doesn't simply tell the participants to do this, it walks the participants through it, in going through samples of how prior generations did this. And in participating in the recitation in this way, the participant is also participating in the community of all those who have done this in the past. "Through this mode of symbolization, the Exodus thus serves, not only as the historical beginning of the nation of Israel, but as an imaginative origin by which the Jewish community is regularly recreated through its performance of ritual" (p. 128).

This is not necessarily a perfectly exhaustive list, although obviously it covers a great deal. But the strength of it lies in its generalizability.

Various Links of Interest

* A Close Look at the Frontrunning Coronavirus Vaccines As of April 23

* At the Journal of the History of Philosophy:
Anselm Spindler, Politics and Collective Action in Thomas Aquinas's On Kingship
Deborah Boyle, Mary Shepherd on Mind, Soul, Self
Edward Slowik, Cartesian Holenmerism and Its Discontents
Lawrence Pasternack, Restoring Kant's Conception of the Highest Good
Dario Perinetti, Hume at La Flèche
Terry Echterling, What Did Glaucon Draw?

* Étienne Brown, Kant’s Doctrine of the Highest Good: A Theologico-Political Interpretation

* Tyler Hildegrand, Non-Humean Theories of Natural Necessity

* Nathan Pinkoski, How Not to Challenge the Integralists

* Charles De Koninck, The End of the Family and the End of Civil Society

* Gordon Graham, Scottish Philosophy in the 19th Century, at the SEP

* Snail salves, waters, & syrups at "Early Modern Medicine"

* Gray Connolly, The Geopolitical Lessons of 2020

* Thomas Pink, Suarez on Authority as Coercive Teacher

* The Impossibility of Language Acquisition, an interesting semi-interview with language research pioner Lila Geitman, was a really enjoyable look at the issues in studying language acquisition.

* Kelsey Donk looks at some of the likely effects of the shutdowns on our food supply. Briefly and roughly: most of what we have seen so far has been due simply to adjustment problems, given that we have distinct commercial and grocery food distribution systems and it is very difficult to switch from one to the other; we are not anywhere near a real shortage, since the problem is that we are actually having gluts that we can't sell because we can't distribute them to the people who are buying. These problems will slowly be solved by various sorts of improvised solutions. But food production has to be planned about a year ahead based on what we can do now; as what farmers can do now massively contracts due to distribution problems and the like, we will likely see the effects starting in February of next year. If the lockdowns don't last a long time, the problems will likely be minor disruptions in the U.S. -- milk might become very expensive, bacon might be almost impossible to get, some things might have roller coaster prices or go in and out of availability. Food distribution brownouts, so to speak. The reason they will be minor, however, is that the U.S. is a massive agricultural exporter; what is likely to happen is that we will use domestically what would usually be sold abroad. Since other exporting nations will likely do the same, nations that are less agriculturally self-sufficient -- and there are a lot -- will find their domestic production stretched very thinly. Of course, a lot depends on decisions made between now and next year as to how serious that will become.

Currently Reading

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Matthew C. Briel, A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios
Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick

Some Poem Drafts

Sons and Daughters

I never had much to begin with.
I never knew the road to take.
All of my plans are seed ungrowing,
crumbled to dust all things I made.
I've laughed and cried
in much the way of mortal men;
I've smiled and sighed,
again, again, again.
Looking back I see an endless road
of errors made, mistakes uncaught,
with all those failures bricks in Babel
that never reached the sky I sought.

But this I know, my sons and daughters:
I fought with valiant heart and true.
Though many things I did not understand,
I did my honest best for you.

My wishes somehow turned to ashes,
my hopes would rarely bear their fruit.
So many treasures lost in shadows!
So many dreams withered at root!
I've closed my ears
to voices all around me;
I was so blind
for I did not wish to see.
When I repent, my tears well up like a river.
I took my chance on where the coins would fall,
my every deed was reckless as a gamble;
I did not win. Perhaps I lost it all.

But this I know, my sons and daughters:
though my works fade, I leave to you
the mountains, heavens, fields, and waters
which your fresh eyes may see anew.

Fragment of an Epic

Speak, O music Spirit, of the high Moon
and, bursting into legend out of life,
the ways and doings of the starward men
who rose like eagles to the argent light
and drove the black star-road to lunar lands;
of the twelve who walked, the Earth in their sky,
in deserts where no air nor water flows,
but also of those patient men who sailed
around the moon in never-ending fall
and, too, of those who aided them in flight.

Interplay

She laughed,
a dancing fountain
liquid with joy
light sunray-ballerinas
glittering in golden beam
and full of fluid smiles.

His heart
in aquiline sunrise
took wing in fiery blaze,
each feather sparking
at each exalting beat.

Story

First Day
Long Kiss
Fun Months
Wedding Bells
Crying Kids
Hard Times
Little Wins
Old Age
Final Hours
Endless Hopes

Du Fu's Spring View

the empire is fallen
mountains and rivers stand

the city is in spring
it is thick with grass and tree

one feels the time
the flowers drop tears

distressed by distance
the birds alarm the heart

the beacons are aflame
lasting for three months

a letter from home
costs ten thousand gold

my white hair
is scratched ever shorter

the whole thing soon
will not hold a hairpin

Osborne on Aquinas's Ethics

Thomas Osborne's Aquinas's Ethics, in the Cambridge Elements series, is available online for free until May 18. It's a pretty decent introduction to the topic. One thing I saw that I think is not quite right:

The efficient cause provides some difficulty for Aquinas’s appropriation of Lombard’s definition. An efficient cause is the agent that brings about the act. According to Aquinas, Lombard’s definition identifies the efficient cause with God in the part that reads, “which God works in us without us.” Aquinas does not apply this part of the definition to an Aristotelian definition of virtue. The Christian thinkers who preceded Aquinas developed a distinction between the traditional moral virtues that are discussed by philosophers and the theological virtues, which exceed human abilities and are directly about God (Bejcvy 1990). Influenced by this tradition, Aquinas distinguishes between virtues that are described by the philosophers and those that are known and acquired through divine help. Aquinas holds that this part of the definition applies only to those Christian virtues that are caused directly by God and are described as “infused virtues.” Since they exceed natural powers, they cannot be acquired; their acts cannot be performed without divine help.

Osborne seems to be assuming that if we remove the clause, we are removing the need for divine help, but I don't think this is what Aquinas means. Aquinas is quite clear that we need divine help for all virtue, including acquired virtue. If we remove the phrase, “which God works in us without us”, from the Augustinian definition as brought together in Lombard, what we get is the genus that includes both infused and acquired virtue. The difference is really in Osborne's "caused directly by God"; or, in other words, in the "without us" part of the Augustinian definition. As he puts it (ST 2-1.55.4ad6), in acquired virtue God still works in us, but in the way in which He works in every will and nature, i.e., as first mover or remote efficient cause, not as proximate or immediate cause. But it's tricky to be precise about such a matter in a brief space, since we don't have a convenient ethical vocabulary for discussing the infused/acquired virtue distinction, so this might just be inadvertence.

Laughing Over the Gold Sunflower

Three Flower Petals
by Archibald Lampman

What saw I yesterday walking apart
In a leafy place where the cattle wait?
Something to keep for a charm in my heart--
A little sweet girl in a garden gate.
Laughing she lay in the gold sun's might,
And held for a target to shelter her,
In her little soft fingers, round and white,
The gold rimmed face of a sunflower.

Laughing she lay on the stone that stands
For a rough hewn step in that sunny place,
And her yellow hair hung down to her hands,
Shadowing over her dimpled face.
Her eyes like the blue of the sky made dim
With the might of the sun that looked at her,
Shone laughing over the serried rim,
Golden set, of the sunflower.

Laughing, for token she gave to me
Three petals out of the sunflower.
When the petals are withered and gone, shall be
Three verses of mine for praise of her,
That a tender dream of her face may rise,
And lighten me yet in another hour,
Of her sunny hair and her beautiful eyes,
Laughing over the gold sunflower.

A Tale of Signs and Trust

Then on the third day a wedding took place in the Galilean Cana, and the mother of Jesus was there, so Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding. Then, the wine having run out, the mother of Jesus says to Him, "They have no wine."

Then Jesus says to her, "What is it to me and you, ma'am? My hour is not yet."

Says His mother to the servants, "Whatever He might tell you, do."

Now there were standing there six stone water-jars for purification in the Judean style, with room for two or three metetes. Says Jesus to them, "Fill the water-jars with water." Then they filled them to the brim.

He says to them, "Draw some out and carry it to the one presiding over the feast."

And they took it, and when the one presiding had tasted it, the water having become wine and he not knowing whence it was -- though the servants knew, having drawn the water -- he calls the bridegroom and says to him, "Every man sets out the good wine at first and the worse after they have drunk freely; you have kept the good wine until now."

This Jesus did in Galilean Cana, the beginning of signs. Then He manifested His glory and His disciples trusted in Him.

After this He went down to Capernaum, He and His mother and His brothers and His disciples, and they stayed there a few days.

Then the Judean passover was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Then He found in the holy place those those selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers were sitting down. Then, having made a whip out of ropes, He drove it all out of the holy place, the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the coins of the moneychangers, and overturned the tables. Then to those selling doves, He said, "Take these away; do not make my Father's house a mercantile house."

His disciples remember that is written: Jealousy for your house will consume me.

Thus the Judeans answered and said to Him, "What sign do you show, that you may do these things?"

Jesus answered and said to them, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it."

Thus the Judeans said, "This temple was forty-six years in the building and in three days you will raise it!"

Yet He was speaking about the temple of His body. When therefore He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this. Then they trusted Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.

And when He was in Jerusalem at the passover, at the festival, many trusted in His name, seeing the signs He was doing. But Jesus did not trust them, because He knew them all, and because He had no need for evidence about man, for He knew Himself what was within man.

John 2, my rough translation. I was struck by a few things. First, which I've thought before, the wedding story is rather funny. Jesus' mother essentially ignores His entirely reasonable protest, a phenomenon every mother's son has experienced at some point. And the architriclinius (presider over the feast) is quite clearly implying that the bridegroom (who can't possibly know what he's talking about) is an idiot who hadn't figured out something everyone knows.

Second, these two stories together have some interesting interplay between evidence and trust. In both the people technically in charge don't have a clue what's going on; in both it is emphasized that the disciples trusted Jesus after signs that made things obvious. And then we have the interesting bit at the end, in which many people trust Jesus because they see the signs -- in the context of a festival, the verb seems often to suggest being a spectator -- but Jesus does not reciprocate the trust because He does not need to draw His conclusions on the basis of things, like signs, that serve as evidence ('testify', as the translations usually have) -- He already knows.

The word for testifying or serving as evidence has been used before (John 1:7-8), in talking about John the Baptist, who came to serve as evidence of the Light. Later (also in the temple) he will get into an argument again with the Judeans, and says that if He gives evidence for Himself, the evidence is not true; another is giving evidence for Him and the evidence that one gives is true -- John had previously given evidence, but now His evidence is not from man but from the Father, and seen in the works He does and in Scripture. Still later (again in the temple) Jesus will identify as the Light in question (John 8:12), after which the Pharisees will attempt to turn his prior claim against Him, telling Him He is trying to serve as evidence for Himself; Jesus replies that even if that were so, such evidence can still be true because He recognizes whence He comes and whither He goes, or more exactly, He says, "I am the evidence for Myself" (John 8:18), because His Father is giving evidence in having sent Him. (Naturally, they then want to speak to his dad to get this supposed evidence.)

Much of the Gospel of John is concerned with the theme of people trying to get evidence while being completely oblivious of what's going on right in front of them; evidence keeps being given, but even the disciples don't see it until Jesus makes it obvious. But of course, immediately after the above stories from John 2, we get the discussion with Nicodemus, in which Jesus flatly says that no one can see the kingdom without being born from above. (The expression is often translated as 'reborn' or 'born again', but it's literally 'from above'. While the 'from above' was often an expression for 'again', given other things Jesus says, it is clear he does mean it literally, but Nicodemus, as if to make Jesus' point for Him, takes the 'from above' in the figurative sense, so asks how the elderly can be born.)

In John 6, the crowds are following Him because of His signs (around passover again); then He performs the miracle of feeding the five thousand. This causes Him more trouble with the crowds, and He accuses them of following Him because of the food rather than the signs; they should instead trust the one God has sent. At which point they demand that He give them a sign, like manna, so they could trust Him, as if He had not just recently done so. Jesus was right not to trust their trust, not to believe their belief. It's not an accident that John has the episode in which God literally speaks from the heavens and some of the people say it was just thunder (John 12:28-29).

Doctor Providentiae

Today is the feast of St. Caterina di Giacomo di Benincasa, better known as St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church. She was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. From a letter to her brother, whose name seems to have been Benincasa di Benincasa:

Dearest brother in Christ Jesus: I Catherine, a useless servant, comfort and bless thee and invite thee to a sweet and most holy patience, for without patience we could not please God. So I beg you, in order that you may receive the fruit of your tribulations, that you assume the armour of patience. And should it seem very hard to you to endure your many troubles, bear in memory three things, that you may endure more patiently. First, I want you to think of the shortness of your time, for on one day you are not certain of the morrow. We may truly say that we do not feel past trouble, nor that which is to come, but only the moment of time at which we are. Surely, then, we ought to endure patiently, since the time is so short. The second thing is, for you to consider the fruit which follows our troubles. For St. Paul says there is no comparison between our troubles and the fruit and reward of supernal glory. The third is, for you to consider the loss which results to those who endure in wrath and impatience; for loss follows this here, and eternal punishment to the soul.

From her most influential work, The Dialogue:

The soul, who is lifted by a very great and yearning desire for the honor of God and the salvation of souls, begins by exercising herself, for a certain space of time, in the ordinary virtues, remaining in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better the goodness of God towards her. This she does because knowledge must precede love, and only when she has attained love, can she strive to follow and to clothe herself with the truth. But, in no way, does the creature receive such a taste of the truth, or so brilliant a light therefrom, as by means of humble and continuous prayer, founded on knowledge of herself and of God; because prayer, exercising her in the above way, unites with God the soul that follows the footprints of Christ Crucified, and thus, by desire and affection, and union of love, makes her another Himself. Christ would seem to have meant this, when He said: To him who will love Me and will observe My commandment, will I manifest Myself; and he shall be one thing with Me and I with him.

The 'another Himself' phrase is, of course, an allusion to the common saying that a friend is another self.

A Mousetrap for the Devil

The Devil exulted when Christ died, and by that very death of Christ the Devil was overcome: he took food, as it were, from a trap. He gloated over the death as if he were appointed a deputy of death; that in which he rejoiced became a prison for him. The cross of our Lord became a trap for the Devil; the death of the Lord was the food by which he was ensnared.

This passage, from one of St. Augustine's Ascension sermons, has had an interesting history. The translation above, which I take it is Sister Mary Sarah Muldowney's, is a very sober translation, but you can easily translate this more flamboyantly. The word for 'trap' here is muscipula, which literally means a mousetrap. And the image of the Cross as a mousetrap for the devil, the theme of muscipula diaboli, crux Christi, is one that you find in a number of places. One of the more famous is the Mérode Altarpiece, which has St. Joseph making mousetraps while the Annunciation is going on (you can click through for a better view):



In reality, while the word does literally and etymologically mean 'mousetrap', it had become a very common word for all kinds of traps. If you read a lot of Augustine, you know that he usually doesn't invent things like this, although he will sometimes employ them creativity; the image actually comes from Scripture. The Latin of the Psalter Augustine knew uses muscipula a lot for any kind of hunting snare; for instance, in Psalm 124:7 (or 123:7 in the old numbering) it is used for a bird-snare: "We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped." It's the common Scriptural image of the wicked laying a snare for others; and as in Psalm 9:16, it is sometimes presented as the wicked falling into their own snare. And this, of course, is something like Augustine's idea, which he mentions explicitly earlier in the sermon:

But if He had not been put to death, death would have not died. The Devil was overcome by his own trophy, for the Devil rejoiced when, by seducing the first man, he cast him into death. By seducing the first man, he killed him; by killing the last Man, he lost the first from his snare.

Probably the most accurate translation for it would be 'pitfall', i.e., a trap consisting of a baited hole in the ground; Adam is thrown into the pit (death) and throwing Adam into the pit (bringing death upon humanity) leads to throwing Christ into the pit (Christ as man also dies on the Cross); but Christ rises and ascends out of the pit (Resurrection and Ascension), bringing Adam with him. And because of it, the Devil himself is toppled into a pit (hell, the second death) because he was greedy for the bait (death for all human beings, which includes Christ).

But the mousetrap makes for a very vivid image.

Fortnightly Book, April 26

There should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation.

The next fortnightly books will be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most popular Holmes novel and his least read Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear.

Hound, which is widely regarded as one of the great detective stories of all time, was serialized in The Strand Magazine in 1901 and 1902. Benefiting from the extraordinary success of the Holmes short stories and building on Doyle's strengths and interests, unleashed on a public that was hungry for more Holmes after Doyle had killed him off eight years earlier, it took the world by storm, and its success was what convinced Doyle to try to write more Sherlock Holmes tales.

Valley, which is the Holmes novel people are least likely to have read, was serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1914 and 1915. As with his first two novels, Doyle combines Holmesian detection with an exotic foreign locale, this time the strange and wild land of Pennsylvania, where coal miners are legion and struggles between miners and owners have come to a boiling point, with the latter bringing in the Pinkertons. However, there's more here than meets the idea; offstage, in the shadows, Professor Moriarty is spinning a complicated and dangerous web. Despite everyone knowing Moriarty as his witness, this is the only story other than "The Final Problem" in which Moriarty is definitely involved (although Moriarty is mentioned briefly in five other late stories). Indeed, part of Valley's purpose seems to be to fill in a bit of the backstory about the enmity between Holmes and Moriarty.

While both Hound and Valley are written after Holmes's death in "The Final Problem", they are both a return to the pre-death Holmes. (Valley, in fact, creates one of the well-known puzzles for enthusiasts of the Great Game, since in "The Final Problem" Watson seems to be completely ignorant of Moriarty, whereas here, despite the story being set earlier, Watson knows him very well.

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Introduction

Opening Passage:

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.

Summary: Samuel Pickwick was a very successful businessman who has retired; like many retire, he has to manufacture something to occupy his time, which he does by getting together with friends. This is the origin of The Pickwick Club, whose reason for being is to uncover and tell quaint and curious stories from all over. A good-natured, generous individual driven by interest in the curious and peculiar will inevitably have some difficulty with others taking advantage, so Pickwick ends up in a wide variety of complicated situations, including at one point getting sued for breach of promise due to the cunning machinations of some slippery lawyers and ending up in debtor's prison, despite being extraordinarily rich, because he refuses to give a penny to such dishonest lawyers.

The primary mode of storytelling here is episodic, and thus is character-driven rather than plot-driven. Since it draws on comedy conventions, courting and marriage come up a lot. Besides Pickwick, we follow his three close friends (the Pickwickians) and his manservant.

(1) Nathaniel Winkle: Winkle is the only remnant of the original proposal of comic stories about a sporting club; he is a sporting enthusiast but also consistently inept with a gun. He has a flirtatious relationship with Arabella Allen.

(2) Augustus Snodgrass: A poet who never finishes any poetry, he tries to marry Emily Wardle.

(3) Tracy Tupman: A good-natured, fat, middle-aged man who thinks of himself has something of a ladies' man, he gets outmaneuvered in his attempt to marry Rachael Wardle (Emily's spinster aunt) by a smooth-talking con artist, Alfred Jingle.

(4) Samuel Weller: A clever, cockney all-purpose handyman, Weller is hired by Pickwick early on as a manservant, and becomes central to helping Pickwick get out of his scrapes. He is actually what Tupman thinks of himself as being, and one of the key questions of his storyline is whether his flirtation with the pretty maid Mary (who is essential to getting Winkle and Arabella together) will ever amount to more than a flirtation.

To the extent that there is a unified story, it is structured by the indirect battle between the Pickwickians and their nemeses, Alfred Jingle and his manservant Job Trotter. Jingle and Pickwick are equal-and-opposite; their courses of life parallel each other almost exactly, but their personalities take them in different directions. Since Pickwick is innocent and inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, and Jingle is cunning and always scheming for advantage, Jingle generally has the upper hand when they cross paths, and, as you might expect, a key issue in the story is how Pickwick's innocent goodwill toward people will win out over the apparent advantages of Jingle's machinations.

The Pickwick Papers is very much about friendship, and I suspect one element in its enduring popularity is how well Dickens captures the combination of the absurd and the admirable that so often constitutes friendship-adventures that become stories worth telling, combined with his talent for exaggerating to comic effect. The episodic nature of the story, combined with its length, makes it the sort of book, however, that's probably best taken in small portions. We forget that these big nineteenth-century books weren't usually written to be read altogether but as serials; this is certainly true of The Pickwick Papers. Trying to read it all at once is a bit like trying to marathon through four or five seasons' worth of sitcom episodes. Repetitions that are charming recurring jokes when partaking serially can become merely repetitive in the marathon; details that are striking and enjoyable in serial can start blurring into the background in marathon; goofiness in small sips becomes a bit much in vast quantities; and so forth. With Dickens's skill, you still get something worth reading in large gulps, but it's still a work designed to be taken by the shot glass rather than by the beer stein.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book, in my opinion, were the occasional digressions, as the Pickwickians come across characters with their own odd stories, giving us a digression and a bit of a rest from the Pickwickian humor. "The Stroller's Tale" (Chapter 3), "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton" (Chapter 29), and "The Story of the Bagman's Uncle" (Chapter 49) are all excellent short stories in their own right. The Christmas chapters (Chapter 28 and following) were enjoyable as well, since Dickens really pulls out the descriptive stops, and Dickens is hilariously funny whenever lawyers are involved. I particularly appreciated Serjeant Buzfuz's attempt to argue that Pickwick had obviously been leading Mrs. Bardell on, given a note that said "Dear Mrs. B.—Chops and tomata sauce", since 'chops' and 'tomata sauce' could only be interpreted as affectionate nicknames, as well as the cunning with which Mrs. Bardell's establish the truth of the proverb that, come what may, the lawyers get their pay.

I also listened to the Mercury Theater on the Air's radio adaptation of The Pickwick Papers, which can be found here, here (#18), and here. It's quite faithful, since the episodic narrative means you can select which episodic events to use, but it likewise shows some of the difficulties of adapting the episodic narrative -- things just kind of go in random directions. It's really obvious, though, that the actors were enjoying themselves (the exaggerated features of Dickensian characters give radio actors a lot to work with, especially in a story like this that differentiates the characters by manner of speech) and once we get a coherent stretch, namely the breach of promise trial, things start picking up. Welles unsurprisingly plays a fast-talking Mr. Jingle, but given the structure of the work and the limits of adaptation, there's much less of him than you'd expect.

Favorite Passage:

‘An abstruse subject, I should conceive,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Very, Sir,’ responded Pott, looking intensely sage. ‘He crammed for it, to use a technical but expressive term; he read up for the subject, at my desire, in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I was not aware that that valuable work contained any information respecting Chinese metaphysics.’

‘He read, Sir,’ rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr. Pickwick’s knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority—‘he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information, Sir!’

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, although, again, you should probably take it in small portions.

Dashed Off VII

For the same reason that Carnap relativizes observability to organs of an organism, he should also relativize it to instruments.

Russell's 'supreme maxim in scientific philosophising' amounts to this: fictions are to be substituted for evidence.

Stipulative definitions are always for a purpose, and to be judged thereby.

The internal structure of a method is neither analytic nor empirical.

We can infer from as-if assertions just as well as from real assertions.

"All imperatives are formulae of a practical necessitation." Kant
"An obligation implies not that an action is necessary merely, but that it is made necessary; it is not a question of necessitas, but of necessitatio. Thus, while the divine will is, as regards morality, a necessary will, the human will is not necessary but necessitated."
"Every imperative expresses the objective necessitation of actions which are subjectively contingent."

exemplar : formal cause :: destiny : final cause

Confirmation of theory is just a form of analogy.

management envelope forms of quasi-property (e.g., shell corporations) and quasi-jurisdiction (e.g., titular see)

The correspondence relevant to truth occurs within our thought, given the nature of thought.

modes of the hopeful: receptive, intrusive, liminal, ambiguous

Sin taxes tend to be punishments of the poor for not choosing the recreations of the rich.

In order to begin its work, a discipline does not need to form a definite conception of the subject matter; definition is built by inquiry. It does, however, require that there be something that can assign terms.

"Everywhere the core of the knowledge process turns out to be a rediscovery." Schlick

In creativity as in all else, nest before egg.

Implicit definitions have to be traced back to reality like any other; they are just at a higher level of abstraction (or signification, if you prefer).

Judgments exist so that concepts can be made.

Schlick's account of judgments should have led him to treat them as a subset of concepts (namely those that are signs of relations as existing). This in turn should have led him to handle impersonalia differently. ('It is snowing' would best be seen as having a single term, snowing, designating a kind of relation, and the judgment be distinguished from the concept of snowing only by signifying the existence of what 'snowing' signifies'.)

regularity theory // preestablished harmony

ludics, artistic technics, and etiquette as being semi-ethical by nature

reason-seeking, reason-demanding, reason-giving
(search, challenge, argument)

'I know A as B' is not equivalent to 'I know that A is B'.

"The task of a sign is to be a representative of that which is designated, to act in its place in some respect or other." Schlick

If I say, 'Concept A is similar (almost like) concept B', the predicate is not part of the definition of the subject (if we aren't talking about shared genus or a relative concept) but similarity between concepts is not determined by sensible experience. In short, not all relations between concepts are definitional, in the sense of being part of the definition of at least one of the concepts, even if it is based on those definitions (e.g., this definitional structure has similarities to that). We see this even more clearly in more complicated cases, e.g., A is more like B than C, where 'more like B than C' is not generally part of how A is defined, although the reason for saying it is due to A's definition.

Perception is always of relations.

People will talk about justice for many reasons; but the people who have the most incentive to talk about justice are the unjust.

conflicts of interest as occasions for temptations to failures of integrity

That we have itches we scratch to satisfy does not imply that we scratch in order to get pleasure from scratching; we scratch in order to address the itch.

We draw our knowledge not from bare sensations but from familiarities.

"Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it something holy and religious: not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature." Leo XIII

certain kinds of saint patronage // attributed arms

A true insight of the linguistic turn is that progress can sometimes be made by pulling back from the arguments in order to critique the problems or questions.

Every experiment, and every experimental design, has to deal with the distinction between the real and the unreal.

In pre-philosophical thought, there is no clear recognition of time as a condition of the real.

The principle of noncontradiction is a principle of both analysis and synthesis.

"A sympathetic understanding of a philosophical system...consists in picturing to oneself just exactly what sense is assumed within that system by each question or assertion of everyday life and science." Schlick
"We see again and again that the positivist directs his critique against a specially constructed concept of the thing-in-itself and then supposes that he has refuted the general idea of such a thing."
"There is no sense organ that senses time; the entire self experiences it."

Concepts are constructed takes on the real.

The phenomena can only be the noumena appearing.

Mathematical concepts must be taken to be such that they can apply to reality. But that they can in fact apply is not a matter of definition (you cannot get it by bare stipulation in the concept itself) nor is it a matter of experience (because many such concepts go well beyond anything we have experienced in actual cases to which they apply).

Conventions may be more or less appropriate.

How to apply a definition is not generally incorporated into the definition.

That something can be is at the same time evident in itself and about the real world.

felt reception vs felt resistance accounts of cause, the external world, etc.

Morale is a necessary part of military strategy because it is directly relevant to loyalty and obedience.

While Dilthey is right that it is the nature of life to attempt to fill each moment with value, it would be an error to conclude that early years are not means to mature years. This is precisely what we take to be the promise of youth.

protection-racket progressivism

When people talk about 'following where the argument leads' they tend to assume that it leads in one way and in one direction. But in fact, given that one may respond to arguments in many ways (ponens, tollens, suspend judgment while checking against other things, etc.), when we follow an argument we do so out of our entire spiritual background, and people for whom that background is different -- different experiences, different educations, different practical and moral goals -- may well take the same argument to lead in very different directions.

Christ's Baptism is not in the genus of our baptism, but it is the exemplar and template.

Johnson (1960): Both 'No synthetic propositions are a priori' and 'Some synthetic propositions are a priori' would, if true, have to be synthetic a priori truths, in the sense of about the world and such that the contradictory is self-contradictory.

Krishna (1961): Synthetic a priori is required in order to have logical derivations involving empirical truths.

Lambros (1975): Logical positivism has four distinct accounts of necessary truths, each of which is a different kind of denial of synthetic a priori. It is the denial that the a priori can inform about the world (and is instead linguistic) either (a) taking the a priori to be rule or (b) taking the a priori to be propositional; if (b), then either (b1) it is true in virtue of conceptual content or (b2) it is true in virtue of syntactic form; if (b2), either (b2a) absolutely (all languages) or (b2b) relativized to some languages. (a) is derived from Wittgenstein, found in Hans Hahn: Logic is not about objects but wholly about ways of speaking about objects. (b1) of some kind is found in Schlick. (b2a) is a standard reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. (b2b) is found in Carnap.

Williams (1938): A convention is a habitual way of behaving, not a proposition; an analytic proposition cannot be a convention. Nor can it be a description of a convention; such descriptions are necessarily synthetic. Nor can ti be a rule, command, resolve, etc.

Beck (1957): 'Analytic' is a logical/linguistic term; 'a priori' is epistemological. They should not be elided even if coextensive. The reasons why some people want to say that a principle is analytic *in a particular body of science* are the *same reasons* Kant held them to be synthetic a priori.

'White is this color', pointing to white, seems to be analytic a posteriori.

necessary synthetic a posteriori propositions (reachable by proper induction)

The rights of the child grow up within the ambit of the rights of the parent.

One: Rv 21:9-10
Holy: Rv 21:11, 22-23, 27
Catholic: Rv 21:24-26
Apostolic: Rv 21:12-21

habitus -> mutually reinforcing habitus among more than one person
- Call the latter a consortium. By cultivating a habitus we make possible a consortium among people with the same or corresponding habitus. Thus you can have consortium among people sharing skills, and consortium among people sharing virtues; perhaps even consortium among people sharing some vices. Friendship of excellence is perhaps the highest consortium contributing to common good and human happiness, but only the most eminent among many consortia that do so. Consortium strengthens and refines habitus (or provides opportunity for act) and makes it more consistently effective on the large scale.

Defending only saints is an excuse not to do much.

For attaining beatitude, two things are required: nature and grace." ST 1.73.1ad1

aptitude : skill :: decency : virtue

"Although there are many causes of anything, one is always the completer, which is cause above all, and it is of this that it is said that knowing is when we understand the cause." Albert, IN Post An 1tr2c1.

Music on My Mind

Patty Gurdy's Circle, "Kalte Winde".

Harow! St. George to Our Aid!

St. George and the Dragon
by Dinah Maria Craik

"Dieu et Mon Droit"

What, weeping, weeping, my little son
Angry tears like that great commander
Alexander –
Because of dragons is left not one
To be a new Cappadocian scourge
For your bold slaying
In grand arraying,
Mounted alone, eh?
On Shetland pony
A knight all perfect, a young St. George?

Come sit at my knee, my little son:
Sit at my knee and mend your wagon: -
Full many a dragon
You'll have to fight with ere life be done.
Come, shall I tell you of three or four --
Villanous cattle!
For you to battle,
When mother's sleeping
Where all your weeping
Will not awaken her any more?

First, there's a creature whose name is Sloth
Looks like a lizard, creeping on sleekly
Simple and weakly,
Powerless to injure however wroth:
But slay him, my lad, or he'll slay you!
Crawling and winding,
Twisting and binding:
Break from him, tramp on him
And as you stamp on him
You'll be St. George and the dragon anew.

Then there's a monster - so fair at first,
Called Ease, or Comfort, or harmless Pleasure;
Born of smooth Leisure -
On Luxury's lap delicious nurst;
Who'd buy your soul if you'd sell it — just
To catch one minute
With joyance on it
Or ward off sorrow
Until to-morrow –
Trample him, trample him into dust!

One more — the reptile yclept False Shame,.
That silently drags its feltered length on,
And tries its strength on
Many a spirit else pure from blame;
But up and at him your courser urge!
Smite hard, I trow, hard
The moral coward,
At throne or altar,
Nor once, once falter -
And be my own son, my brave St. George!

St. George and the dragon — ah, my boy,
There are many old dragons left, world-scourges,
And few St. Georges —
There's much of labor and little of joy!
But on with you — on to the endless fight -
Your sword firm buckle,
To no man truckle,
Wave your bold flag on
And slay your dragon.
St. George for ever! God and my right!

Dinah Craik is best known as a novelist, particularly for John Halifax, Gentleman, but like many successful women authors in the nineteenth century, she wrote in a very wide variety of genres, including didactic works and book-length fairy tales. I like this layered handling of the tale of St. George, which is clearly influenced, albeit not slavishly, by Spenser's The Faerie Queene.


Raphael, Saint George and the Dragon

St. George’s Day, 1904
by Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley

April 23

The annual meeting of the Guild of St. George, which was founded by John Ruskin, was held at Sheffield on Saturday.

To-day our land remembers him who fought
The Dragon, hails the Cappadocian brave
Who from the loathly thing went forth to save
Pure Innocence, and her salvation wrought.
This is the day a nation’s thanks are brought
By Avon’s shore to God, who Shakspere gave;
To-day we lay Lent lilies on a grave
In Grasmere Vale and think what Wordsworth taught.

And, gathered here in Vulcan’s town to-day,
Where the smoke dragons from their high-built towers
Plague the live air and cheat the poor of sun,
Do not our hearts in loyal memory run
To him who loved pure light and innocent flowers,
And sent us forth all dragon beasts to slay?

Rawnsley is most famous for being one of the founding members of the National Trust, although he was also involved in a number of projects for the preservation of the environment and the support of the working class. He also is one of the people who encouraged Beatrix Potter to publish her stories.


Briton Rivière, St. George and the Dragon, wherein St. George expresses how we all feel sometimes.

St. George for Merry England

This world, it is a wilding world,
a world of sin and shame;
it speaks and moans a sighing word
and hides its very name.
The dragons rise on every side,
they speak with voice of flame;
but still there rides a knight to fight
and counter dragon's claim.

And all the peasants, ground to dust,
now walk a rocky way;
all the princes forfeit trust
and flee the rightful fray,
but heaven's knight on steed of white
with cross upon his shield
will aid and save the countryside,
will fight, and will not yield.

Cowards cower in dust and mud
as serpents devour the land;
forsaking hope they drop the good,
surrender to drake's demand.
But one will fight, and when he falls
will rise and, rising, stand;
his weary face will pale and pall
but his sword is in his hand.

All people who hear, raise up his song,
the song of the man who will live;
with sound of the drum, the harp and the pipe,
high hallels and rhapsodies give.
Through moor and through forest, through fallowing field
he fights for our honor and grace,
he will fight and never will victory yield
for God shines out in his face.

Waters of life will succor him well
and raise him up from the dead
as the tree of life delivers from hell
by the power of God who bled;
and the dragon will fall, its eye grow dim,
from blade by the holy hand led.
To the dust heel, and countenace grim,
will crush the fell serpent's head.

Ἰφιγένεια ἐν Αὐλίδι

I don't know if I'll actually be able to, but I think I will try to watch this livestream (from Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, lest we think that Harvard has absolutely nothing of value to contribute) live:

Reading Greek Tragedy Online, Wednesdays at 3pm

On Wednesday, April 22 at 3:00-4:30pm ET, join us for a live reading and discussion of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, hosted by Joel Christensen (Brandeis) with special guests Adam Barnard and Mat Carbon (Liège). Featured actors include Tamieka Chavis, Tim Delap, Michael Lumsden, Evvy Miller, Richard Neale, Paul O'Mahony, and Eunice Roberts.

The live stream will appear on the CHS homepage. Recordings of past readings are available on YouTube.

I really like Euripides, and Iphigenia in Aulis is a particularly interesting tragedy. The backstory, of course, is that Helen has been abducted by Paris and the Greeks are at Aulis trying to set sail and begin the Trojan War -- but Artemis is angry at Agamemnon and has used her influence on the sea to turn it into a doldrums. They can't sail. The Greeks on the shore are starting to murmur and get rebellious, and a bloody revolt might spring up if they don't get moving. The goddess must be appeased. And what Artemis wants is the sacrifice of Agamemnon's eldest daughter, Iphigenia. So Agamemnon sends to his wife Clytemnestra, telling her to send Iphigenia to Aulis because he has arranged to marry her to Achilles.

The play as it currently ends has a deus ex machina; Euripides is lavish with gods from the machine, but a lot of Euripides scholars want to see this one as a later addition. I wonder if they will include it.

ADDED LATER: That was really, really good, and makes me want to go back and look at some of the previous ones that have been done. (While they didn't do every part of the play, they did present the standard ending, but also talked about the possibility that it is not original.) Highly recommended, when they eventually put the recording in the archive.

ADDED LATER 2: The Iphigenia in Aulis discussion is now available on their YouTube channel.

Doctor Magnificus

Today is the feast of St. Anselm, Doctor of the Church. From Cur Deus Homo 2.1:

It ought not to be disputed that rational nature was made holy by God, in order to be happy in enjoying Him. For to this end is it rational, in order to discern justice and injustice, good and evil, and between the greater and the lesser good. Otherwise it was made rational in vain. But God made it not rational in vain. Wherefore, doubtless, it was made rational for this end....Wherefore rational nature was made holy, in order to be happy in enjoying the supreme good, which is God. Therefore man, whose nature is rational, was made holy for this end, that he might be happy in enjoying God.

Music on My Mind

Michaela Anne, "Be Easy". She has an interesting short essay on what it is like to be an indie musician in a situation in which you have to cut off the tour and can't leave the house.

The Root of Schooling

People have been talking about this article in Harvard Magazine on 'the risks of homeschooling'. They've pointed out the delusional absurdity of the illustration, which has public school kids outside playing while homeschool kids are trapped inside, which in practice is usually closer to being the opposite of the truth, particularly in these days when recess is often quite restricted, and noted that the view one occasionally finds of homeschooling not being well-socialized is provably a myth. They pointed out the irony of the mistake (now fixed) the illustrator made in misspelling 'arithmetic'. They've pointed out the common experience that in homeschooling one can cover the same amount of material each day in a much shorter time than schoolteachers can because homeschooling parents don't have to shepherd twenty-five students simultaneously through the same material. There were a great many things to point out.

And all of them are right, but they are also to some extent beside the point because the anti-homeschool agenda is not expressing educational experience or even a coherent educational philosophy but a political agenda. It was not surprising to see that the article was about Elizabeth Bartholet. Bartholet is an activist against any kind of education outside of public schools (to the point of being a kook about it), and it's not surprise we get the political agenda being expressed in her comments:

“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Bartholet says. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”

Never mind, of course, that putting teachers in charge of kids rather than parents does literally nothing to stop "powerful people" (she means adults, because being an adult is what in fact gives you power over children) being put in charge of "the powerless" (she means children); we must accept a political regime that many consider a clear step toward totalitarianism in order to avoid a vaguely guessed-at possibility of authoritarianism. (And it is vaguely guessed-at. She vaguely insinuates that children are in greater danger of being abused by parents than teachers, and homeschooled students in greater danger of being abused than public school students, despite the fact that neither of these seems to be true on the evidence that exists. She does not adequately address the widespread problem of authoritarianism in the classroom, and her vague claims about homeschoolers being religious extremists are not well-founded overall -- she herself falls back on 'anecdotal evidence', as if 'anecdotal evidence' of abuse and misuse of power in schools were not also easily available.) Facts are irrelevant to this kind of argument; it is an argument about what Bartholet thinks should be, regardless of the way things are. Public schooling, Bartholet agrees, exists for specific civic ends; that she never establishes that it meets those ends so successfully that homeschooling cannot meet them as well is a side issue. The point is not whether public school is any good at meeting its purported ends, which people like Bartholet never really try to establish; the point for Bartholet is that in a regime allowing full homeschooling, parents (often uneducated parents, as she, Harvard classist to the bone, takes the trouble to insist) rather than people like Bartholet are given authority to judge for themselves whether it is or not. Letting the people decide for themselves is, she insists, anti-democratic. There is no reasoning with a loon like that, because reasoning is not how anyone gets to such a bizarre position.

The fundamental problem with almost all anti-homeschooling positions is that they tend not to recognize a fundamental point, one that is clear enough from the nature of child-raising and is generally recognized by teachers who actually teach children rather than just talk about ways to do so: all schooling is built around parental education. It has been noted since at least Damaris Masham in her arguments for women's education in the seventeenth century that parents, especially mothers, are first teachers. It's generally recognized by those who actually do the teaching in schools that schooling is most effective when education becomes an active cooperation between parents and school personnel. It is generally recognized that parents are the only figures who presumptively have the right to educate their children, even by those who recognize that the state has an interest in regulating education so that it contributes to a citizenry capable of maintaining the responsibilities of citizenship. (Bartholet tries to dance around points like that by making up a conspiracy theory she calls 'parental rights absolutism', a position that parents have and should have absolute power over their children, pushed by nefarious highly-funded ruthless organizations with extraordinary political connections. No one actually has such a view, of course; when she tries to give examples of it, it's always of people just affirming that parents have rights that must be respected. And the notion that the homeschooling movement is some massive political behemoth is actually rather funny. But, again, none of this is based on the actual views or activities of homeschoolers; it's a political agenda, so the goal is to find things said by homeschooling advocates that can be assimilated into the argument.) Schools are a subsidium; they are a back-up system and a support system, and what are they backing up and supporting? It has always been education in the home. Bartholet holds up France and Germany as models, but even setting aside that the French and the Germans allow their state authorities powers that are generally regarded as inconsistent with American principles, she fails to give adequate recognition to the fact that both France and Germany, especially the latter, also have historically treated government-supplied education as a supplement to education in the home. Indeed, you will find Germans who insist that this has always been one of the strengths of the German educational system.

The home is the root of the school. Any argument for compulsory public education that does not start with that recognition is already starting out wrong; an argument for compulsory public education needs to argue for why life in the home is not enough for educating people for civil society, and -- what is often not given -- show that public education does a good job of filling that gap, and -- what is also often not given -- show that it does so to such a degree that the state has a compelling interest in requiring public education rather than getting voluntary cooperation. That's what needs to be done. All this conspiracy-theory thinking about homeschooling as a dark and nefarious political operation reaching out from the shadows (when in reality most people homeschool just because they don't think the public school system is doing a very good job, and their 'political influence' largely just consists in the fact that they are voters in a society in which voters matter and in which other people are sympathetic to the idea that state intervention needs justification) is transparently attempting to rig the discussion so as to be immune to reasons that are actually responsive to what justifies schooling to begin with.

Daring Book

It's really more about the filters academics use to read Austen than about Austen or her novels themselves, but Janet Todd's discussion of re-reading Mansfield Park is interesting:

Mansfield Park is her most daring book. Knowing she had a great popular triumph in Pride and Prejudice, Austen deliberately created a heroine without the endearing qualities that made Elizabeth Bennet universally loved. Jane Austen liked pewter – we have it from her letters – yet not enough to repeat the winning romantic formula when she knew she had a supreme talent for fictional experiment. She wrote of Emma, that she’d created a heroine no one but herself would much like. The opinion better suits Fanny Price, through whom she provokes the reader to address the difficult truth of stubborn integrity.

Ethics and Reasoning Index

As noted at the beginning, this was a barebones introduction to forms of reasoning in ethics, following loosely the order in my Ethics courses while stripping out most secondary readings. Doing the latter required some occasional re-organization; it also made sense to explain in a bit more detail a few things that I can usually only gesture briefly at in lectures, or that I usually explain by way of class activity or assignment rather than directly, where it was relevant to understanding the main figure in question.

Consequentialist
I (Bentham)
II (Mill)
III (Mill)

Deontological
IV (Kant)
V (Kant)

Virtue-Ethical
VI (Aristotle)
VII (Aquinas)
VIII (Aquinas)

If one were going beyond the limited range of primary topics I can cover in a term, one could certainly look at more: non-utilitarian consequentialisms, non-Kantian deontologies, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics. But the point here, of course, was not an exhaustive survey but a first look.

One thing that is perhaps worth emphasizing in general is that in no case is ethics actually seen as standalone, or even something that can be adequately addressed as a standalone field; ethics is always touching on and related with law (Bentham, Aquinas), aesthetics (Mill, Kant), and natural theology (Kant, Aquinas), in quite substantive ways, and here I've only even looked at a few of the really obvious cases -- politics and education are both topics, for instance, that are much more important to ethical reasoning than one would be able to see just from the above survey. Ethics, to be sure, is a sea that touches every shore, but it is more than just general relevance; it draws on and is strengthened by other fields. An ethics standing alone, sealed off from aesthetics, law, religion, politics, education, etc., is a malnourished ethics.

Ethics and Reasoning VIII (Aquinas)

Moral life according to Aquinas requires not just our own self-cultivation (development of virtues exercised in ways appropriate to our state of life), but also external helps. These external helps are not external in the sense of being wholly outside us (and indeed, the most important cases are not), but in the sense that they are not things we ourselves develop; rather, we receive them in some way. There are many such helps; the most important are law and grace. Both of these will also in a number of ways overlap and support the virtues.


Altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli, showing Thomas Aquinas's association with law and grace in both sacrament (church) and teaching (book).

One of Aquinas's most famous philosophical contributions is his definition of law. According to Aquinas, law is

(1) a rational ordering
(2) to common good
(3) by one who is caretaker for what is common
(4) promulgated.

The purpose of a law is to act as guide and be a standard for rational beings, so it is necessary for it to be something that reason can use as a guide and standard. There are many kinds of rational guides and standards, though, even in practical matters. To be a law, it must be something that applies stably to everyone in the community; it must therefore deal with some stable motivation for the community. As an Aristotelian, of course, Aquinas takes this to be happiness, but it must be happiness insofar as it is shared as a goal by the community itself. Thus all law is concerned with that kind of happiness that is the totality of good in a life insofar as it is lived with others. Every community is formed around some common good, some good shared in common by the members of that community, whether that good is possessed or sought. Indeed, community just means 'the whole of what is common' or 'the state of having things in common'. This brings us to the third element of law; to have something of the authority that comes from the common good constituting a community, the law has to be put forward in a way adequate to that common good, that is to say, it can't be just anybody's rational ordering, but must be the rational ordering of a reason that is particularly connected to the common good. It must be put forward by someone who has the care (cura) for what is common. Usually the natural caretaker for a community is the whole community itself working together, but in practice it is often somebody who is designated a public person by the community and who acts as viceregent of everybody. This feature is what distinguishes law from the advice of private persons (which may be providing a rule relevant to common good but are not acting on behalf of the community whose common good it is) or the rules imposed by parents on a household (parents having the care of what is by definition only a partial contribution to common good). And finally, it must be actually applied. That is to say, if the rule is to be obeyed, it must be such that those who obey it can know it, so it must be promulgated or published.

Aquinas takes this to be a strict definition of law. Every law will have all four properties, anything that has all four properties is a law, and these are both true regardless of whether we call it a law or not. Both of them have points that are controverted by other philosophies of law. For instance, it follows from Aquinas's account that something cannot be a law at all if it is in itself inconsistent with common good -- such a thing is really a usurpation of power and an act of violence against the community, even if people call it a 'law'. And there will be quite a few different kinds of laws that will fit this definition, even if they are not what we typically call 'laws'.

The most general and encompassing kind of law is what Aquinas calls eternal law, which is the rational order of divine providence; God, being the good to which the totality of the world is directed and the source of everything in the universe, is the natural caretaker for what is common to the entire universe. The eternal law is in a sense the idea of law itself insofar as the entire world is subject to it. All other kinds of law depend on this, for the simple fact that none of the other kinds of law would exist without it.

More directly relevant to any consideration of ethics and reasoning, however, is natural law. Human practical reason operates according to practical principles, which are the standard against which one measures whether a plan or decision is a good one or a bad one, whether it 'makes sense', whether it is worth implementing, just like the principle of noncontradiction and other principles of theoretical reason are standards against which one measures whether theoretical reasoning is good or bad. These practical principles cover absolutely every practical plan and decision we make. And the most general of these, the noncontradiction of practical reasoning, so to speak, is Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided. If any practical plan violates this, then to that extent it is irrational. To be rational is in part to recognize and apply principles like this.

This principle of practical reason concerns every kind of good or bad. But suppose we look in particular at good that human beings share as human beings. There is a human community; we can recognize goods that we have in common with all other human beings. Examples are things like survival, reproduction and education and care for children, or rational life. But if we focus on this kind of good, then we find that the first principle of practical reason fits the definition of law. By supposition it is being applied in a way that concerns common good; by definition it is a rational ordering to good; as all rational beings can know it, it is promulgated; and it is promulgated by all human beings, who are together the natural caretaker of the common good of all human beings. The same will be true of other principles insofar as they touch on human common good, as well as any conclusions of those principles that do the same. There is a law natural to our own reason, which is our participation in eternal law, and its existence follows from the bare fact that we are rational beings who share a rational human nature with each other. We are always already under law.

An important aspect of how Aquinas builds his account of natural law -- and it is sometimes forgotten even by natural law theorists -- is that natural law serves as a general rational standard, not a rigorous account of the full moral life. It is in fact very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reason out precisely what natural law requires for every single situation. Natural law is linked to acquired virtue in that it obligates us to acquire each virtue and act according to it in some way. It does not obligate us to every act of every virtue, nor does natural law cover every aspect of moral life; but as our virtues all have bearing on the common good of the human race, virtues in a general way are all obligatory under natural law. Natural law cannot replace the virtue of prudence, although it does obligate us to be prudent, and most of the reasoning involved in our actual moral lives will derive from the virtue of prudence approximating and estimating and developing guidelines appropriate to circumstances, not directly by reasoning from natural law.

It is also perhaps worth recognizing that all obligation is in Aquinas's account communal. Without a common good, there is no law. Without a role in a community, there are no offices, i.e., duties based on our state of life. Private goods, goods belonging entirely to one and only one individual, obligate nobody. Obligation is something that arises out of our lives in community. But it is also important to recognize that we are all in community, and cannot function as human beings without being so. Reason is in-common by its very nature; we are social beings not merely in the fact that our natures lead us to try to be in society but in the fact that we are already in a community by the bare fact of being human. Natural law reflects this.

Natural law is a general standard; we often need something more specific. This gives us positive laws, laws that are made for specific purposes, of which there are two kinds, divine law and human law. The essential idea in both is that our moral life is a life of virtue, and acquired virtue is something we can have only by training, for which natural law provides only general guidance. Some of this is training we ourselves develop. But none of us are sufficient of ourselves to determine all the training that must be done in order to be virtuous. We need in part to be trained by others. Advice and admonition will sometimes be enough, for at least some things, but their implementation still depends entirely on our choosing to take them into account, and in matters of common good, it's not possible for everybody just to make their own decision about what should be done, particularly given that some people will choose in ways that are utterly inconsistent with virtue. So we need additional laws that give us specific guidance going beyond natural law. If this comes from God, like the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) or the precepts of Christ, it is divine law; if it comes from the human community, it is human law. Human law has no legitimate rationale other than to make it easier for us to become and to be virtuous people living with others who are becoming and being virtuous people.

All genuine human law by definition has to be consistent with natural law. However, because human means of enforcement cannot cover everything practical reason can, not every precept of natural law can be legislated by human law. For instance, if in addition to recognizing that lying is against natural law, we made it illegal ever to lie by human law, the enforcement of this would be so difficult that we certainly could not enforce it without violating natural law ourselves. So it makes sense simply to endure the fact that people will violate natural law by lying, and confine ourselves only to those things we can morally enforce. This is called the doctrine of toleration: human law must sometimes tolerate violations of natural law. On the other side, though, it is often necessary for us to be in agreement about particular matters that natural law does not on its own decide, so human law gives us a way to work together on particulars that are not rationally necessary but have to be determined if we are to act as we should.

Besides law, the other major factor of our moral lives that enters from outside is grace. 'Grace' is used in three different ways, all connected with the root meaning of the word in Latin, which is freedom. It can mean the love or favor of another person (this is the sense in which you are in someone's 'good graces'). It can mean a gift that is freely given. And it can mean a response to such a gift that is appropriate (this is the sense in which we are grateful or gracious). These are all interlinked: the first gives rise to the second, which gives rise to the third. The second, however, is the primary kind of thing Aquinas has in mind, and the most important thing fitting this description is the quality of the soul, which makes us worthy of God, added to our very being by God in order to lead human beings to God. Such grace can either be a gift directly leading someone to God (sanctifying grace), or a gift helping someone to lead someone else to God (gratuitous grace).

Grace, of course, is the foundation of the infused virtues, which raise human beings to a higher degree of society. However, Aquinas also thinks that we cannot fulfill the obligations of natural law without grace -- we have a tendency toward wrongdoing, so we need grace to compensate for this, and even if we did not, we would still need grace in order not just to conform to the law but to do so in a way that is appropriate to it. We cannot fully act well without divine help; our freedom needs a free gift from God in order to come to the end suitable for it.

In practical life, the notion of grace is generally (although not always) linked with the notion of sacrament, which is also a point at which law and grace intermingle. A sacrament is a sensible sign of something holy insofar as it contributes to our being holy, like sacrifices and tithes. Prior to any specification by divine law, in a regime of natural law, our sacraments our determined by our own vows or (at times) by special divine inspiration; these sacraments have only the most indirect connection with grace, in that we hope that God will give grace to help us because we are recognizing explicitly that we need it. When God gives the Law through Moses, however, He institutes a new regime, one that both gives a divine specification of the sacraments and a greater assurance of divine grace. These sacraments, like circumcision or Old Testament sacrifices, signify grace more consistently and accurately than other sacraments could, and convey a sort of promise that grace will be given. However, as a Christian, of course, Thomas holds that these sacraments are merely preparatory to a more complete form of sacrament, given in the New Law received from Christ; this New Law is itself given by grace, and its sacraments, like baptism, are signs of grace that both contain and cause grace directly to those who are properly disposed. It is in the sacrament of baptism, for instance, that we receive the infused virtues, and it is by the sacrament of penance that the infused virtues are restored if we act so as to lose them. And since, of course, law is by its very nature a communal thing, and determines the nature of sacrament, our primary form of expressing our readiness for grace, and in the case of the New Law, the primary form of receiving it, grace, like law, makes clear that our moral life is a communal life.

Both law and grace, Aquinas thinks, are ultimately founded on divine providence, and thus the moral life can only be fully lived when it is lived in a way appropriate to the broader context established by this divine providence, which is like a higher prudence -- 'prudence', in fact, is just a short form of the word 'providence'. We are not isolated individuals, and cannot be moral as isolated individuals. Our moral life presupposes others, whether by law or by grace or by some lesser assistances like these, and it is done in community with others, both God and other human beings, and it is diversified according to the communities of which we are part and our roles in those communities, and the goal of that life, whether the incomplete goal of peaceful and harmonious felicity or the higher goal of beatitude, is a goal shared in common. And understanding that Thomas sees life as structured in this way by community is essential to understanding his virtue ethics.